"The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded." ~ Vance Packard

RECENT COMMENTS BY Nicholas Strakon

Columns by Nicholas Strakon

The Indiana legislature still hasn't passed the bill controlling the sale of cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, and time is running out in the session. Lately -- praise Chronos! -- the lawfakers have been stemwinding over daylight-saving time. But they've done that deed now, and it seems likely that some cold-med bill will indeed pass.

"He who fights monsters should beware lest he himself become a monster." -- Nietzsche
CounterPunch has posted a piece by Robert Fisk of The Independent, "Racism & Torture as Entertainment: From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib," that I'm going to use as a hook for something I've been meaning to say. Fisk writes: "When the young woman involved in [the Iraqi-prisoner] torture expressed her surprise at...

Earthlings are fast turning into Martians, but in at least one respect I myself have felt like a Martian forever: I've always been puzzled by the fact that some professional sportsmen earn millions of dollars. But it's mostly a market result, even if those millions of market decisions by sports customers are crucially conditioned by an artificially distorted and degraded popular culture. And,...

A government court has convicted Martha Stewart of lying to the government. If she actually did it, good for her! And down with Them!
As a libertarian writer, I've tried to popularize the traditional distinction between a =malum in se,= an act that is wrong in itself; and a =malum prohibitum,= an act that some political authority has prohibited for reasons of its own. The latter category--...

In his recent essay "George Washington: The Dark Side," Henry Gallagher Fields writes of how thieving consolidationists obliged true federalists to resort to the term "Anti-Federalist," and he goes on to describe "the dismal American tradition whereby Lincoln could orate about defending self-determination while pulverizing its remnants in the Southern States; socialists could steal the term '...

"THEY =OWE= ME!" The American military has been described as the country's largest social-service agency, in light of the panoply of benefits accruing to military members and their dependents. But the garrison state promotes the welfare-rights mentality in a more-insidious way, and you can see evidence of that from time to time when Minitrue does an ordinary-folk interview during one of its "news...

It's still sticking in my craw, so I'm going to write about it some more. In a previous "Stop and think" entry I related the travails that resulted from my misguided attempt to purchase a few cigars at a nearby Walgreen's drugstore. But as I banged away at the keyboard I found myself drifting unreachably far from the point I originally wanted to make, namely, that in displaying my outrage I had...

In 1987, when Little George and his band of thugs were only an ugly speck on the horizon, Robert Higgs wound up his great book Crisis and Leviathan by writing, in part:
". . . Assuming that our luck holds and our society survives, we do know something -- at least abstractly -- about the future. We know that other great crises will come. Whether they will be occasioned by foreign wars, economic...

As telescreen viewers may be aware, during a musical interlude in a recent football match a young white boy performing as "Justin Timberlake" (surely a made-up name) momentarily declothed part of the upper body of a black female singer who is apparently related, in some way, to the beloved celebrity Michael Jackson. In response, Authorities within Minitrue and also within the official regime are...